>> funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by the matson mchail foundation in support of public television. also by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community. , experienced, respected and tested. also by hillco partners, texas government affairs consultancy, and its global health care consulting business giant, hillco health. and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and viewers like you. thank you. >> i'm evan smith, he's a pulitzer prize winning reporter nd best selling author whose biographies of bill clinton and vince lombardi of compelling. his latest is barack obama

thhe's david maraniss. this is overheard. ♪ >> david maraniss, welcome. >> thank you, evan. >> great to see you. >> terrific o be here. >> this is a great book and the subject is so big, but i want to go kind of away from the book and ask generally about this president and why after all these years we still don't know where he's from, who he is, donald trump is asking for his college transcripts. i mean, there's not been a person in public life i

would submit to you, about whom so much has been written, although out in the world so much apparently is still unknown. >> well, it's not unknown. >> of course i'm being facetious. >> he's the first african-american president. that's the first and only reason for all of this. >> this is all about race. >> it's all about race. >> at the end of the day you never asked for a birth certificate from a white guy. animosity and hatred that i saw directed towards bill clinton too so i can't say that all of that is about race, but the reason that these -- the conspiratorrists keep jumping from one historical fictional conspire toll account to another you have to ask why. there's only one reason. >> as a buying on ralpher that spent so much time with this man, living inside his world to understand who he is, the question of his birth, the question of any of these issues that have come up have all been asked and answered long ago.

you're absolutely convinced? >> let me deal with, for instance, the birth. for barack obama not to have been born on august 4th, 1961 in honolulu this is the conspiracy that would have had to exist. first the two honolulu papers would have have been part of the conspiracy because they both present the the birth announcements. secondly the immigration and naturalization service would have to have been part of the conspiracy because they were following and tracking barack obama senior during that entire period that he was in hawaii and they were trying to kick him out of the country. if as the right wingers like to say that president obama was born in mbsas, if they had gone there they would never have got espn this country. so that's the second part of it. and third barack obama's mother's name was stanley m dunham. the week of his birth a journalist took a prominent doctor from the medical center out to lunch at the

outrigger canoe club and said what interesting happened in your world this week? he said well, stanley had a baby. it's not everyday that stanley has a baby. every nurse and doctor at the hospital remembered stanley had a baby. it sort of went around the hospital. so for all of those reasons it's just preposterous and it continues. and you know, part of it i úlame -- i blame most of it on racism, but it's enhanced by the modern technologies. in other words, they can now photo shop a so-called birth certificate from coastal hospital in mumbasa and it's going around the internet. >> and peeple believe it. >> people believe t but they made one mistake. most of the early biology ralphrys said that barack obama senior was born in 1936. and so this birth certificate says father's birth 1936. but i discovered the reality

that he was born in 1934. so they -- >> they can't again get their fraud right. >> right. >> there's a fact that obama has been such a controversial figure freeing into many of the conspiracies you allude to. is that what made him a good subject for this book? would any president have interested you or was there something about this particular president? >> well, every book i do i have to be obsessed about some aspect of it. >> right. >> and for this book honestly, evan, i debated longer about whether i wanted to do this book than any i've done before. >> why. >> because of what i considered to beethe toxic political culture of america today. and i knew that trying to do a serious historical biography and throwing it into this culture would be difficult. duty is the facts, butns's putting them in context. and then people rip things out of a book and take them out of context. i wasn't sure i wanted to go through that again. but two things obsessed me

about this book that made me want to do it. the first was the utter randomness of his existence. we're all random creatures, but his story is more unlikely. and i saw in the chance to write aboot his family history, to write about the modern world and modern american. taking you all around the world and all the different issues that are important to all of us. and secondly given the contradictions into which barack obama was born, the biracial and different things that he had to deal with, hhw did he figure it out? how did he recreate himself? and that's what this book is. that's all i ever intended it to be, the world that created barack obama and how he recreated himself. >> and you knew i'm sure david that writing this duke, if the book was not critical of the president in some way or supported rather than refuted many of the conspiracies we've talked about, the haters would hate basically. people would say maraniss is now part of the conspiracy because he's not buying into

the negative view of this president's biography or the hhld we have on them. >> i knew two things would happen, they would admits it and cherry pick things out of t. >> and that did happen. >> and it approximate did happen. i knew it would happen and i had to deal with that. i mean, how do you deal rationally with irrational thought. sometimes i just try to >> as a journalist you deal with it all the time not book. >> yes. >> every single commenter on a story on the internet is someone who is purveyor of irrational thought almost, right? >> you know i don't read those comments anymore. >> that's probably smart. >> it will take years off úour life. >> it's a very sick world. on the one hand you praise it as sort of part of the democratic process, opening it up. but it's like everybody is writing on the bathroom wall. that's really what it is because it's anonymous. >> and they're cowards. they have the anonymity. >> and i obviously get a lot of emails from obama haters.

and once in awhile, once in awhile they have their actual name on it. and whenever they do i write them right back. and then they back away. i mean, they're so used to throwing all this feed anonymously that when you actually confront them as a human being they're embarrassed by it. >> they collapse. you said how unlukely president obama's story is is what drug you to it. he is generation ali the first of his kind. in many ways he and president clinton are of different generations and the imperfection of this generation, the greater likelihood that somebody who goes into public office or seeks the presidency will come from a single parent family or might be biracial or might be go gay or have a non-traditional background. we've had so many traditional backgrounds in the people we elect to public office that we're probably entering an era that people with more no traditional backggounds will be there. it's a path breaker in that way too. >> born in 1961 he's at the

very tail end of the baby boom generation. that's sort of the edge right there, '61, '62. and in one sense as i watched -- the second half of this book is about his search for identity. ands you watch that search through his letters and journals that his girlfriends kept in so many different ways, you see this -- that he's searching for a home. and he has to find that home in the african-american community. and he really is probably, i think, and i hope i'm not being naive about this, but i think he's sort of the last of the generation that has to make that choice. people say well, he's half black and half white. why did he call himself black? it's such a naive question. society defines him as black. but if you talk to kids today who are in college and there are so many that are biracial, just all different sorts of varieties, but they're more comfortable just being who they are.3 >> you don't think that president obama is an example of someone who has almost gotten past in his own mind the question of his

race. he would probably say i'm going to assert this. you tell me if i'll wrong. that he's a president who happens to be black as opposed to a black president. >> he certainly had to deal with that as president very carefully. it's a real interesting issue on how he has dealt with the fact that he's african-american as president. you never hear him talk about t the only time he really did was rather brilliantly during the campaign -- >> the philadelphia speech. >> about dealing with reverend wright. but since then it would be suicide for him to talk about it too much. >> does the african-american community view him as having adequately lived up to his blackness in the last four years? >> throughout his life you'll see that there's always been a question -- you can't say african-american community, but you can say some african-americans have always questioned whether he's black enough? >> it's not monolithic. >> when he ot to college some of his peers in -- black peers said he's an international guy. he's not really one of us. when he was in chicago, you

know, running for office, some of his opponents, whether it was bobby rush in 2000 when he ran in congressional race against a former black panther, that whole race was him saying you're not -- >> he he got beat two to one. >> so he's always had to deal with that to some degree. i feel very uncomfortable saying the black community thinks this. you can say that about anybody. but my estimation is that we don't comprehend yet, and this might -- probably won't happen, but if he's defeated, the sensibility of the black community will be somewhat like reconstruction. you know, here we go again. i think it's going to be very difficult period. >> but the people who oppose him often say that anybody who supports him is supporting him only becausee3 of it. look at what happens -- cole lien powell comes out and supports president obama again. colin powell self identifies

as a republican, a moderate, but a republican. comes out and supports the president again and johnson, the former governor of new hampshire, the former chief of staff to george hw bush is saying he's just supporting him because he's branch. >> isn't that stupid? >> and he's not the only one who says that. he's the most public and most visible, but you know that below the surface people are saying the same thing. >> race is still very much below or above the surface, the central aspect of american life in politics. >> i'm curious as you got to know more about him and the formulation of him as him, one of the things that's fascinated me watching in last four years is how uncomfortable he seems to be with people and how uncomfortable he seems to be with even talking about what he's accomplished. you know, i thought we elected, many of us thought we elected, whether for him or against him, the most gifted orator, the most -- gate who made the most easy connection with people. and yet these last four years have been an effort

for him almost to persuade us otherwise. >> well, he's a very unlikely politician. and here's the reason. he's essentially very competitive. he wants to win. he wants to be president and change the world as much as he can. but he's incredibly ambivalent about the political -- the nature of politics. >> it's a necessary evil. >> and that shows up. i mman, that first debate was a classic example of that. i say and in the book you will see, he has more of a writer's sensibility than a politician's sensibility. he is both a participant and an observer of the process. and so as he's participating seeing the surreal aspects of wwat he has to do. that's not -- that might be a good quality in a person. it's not a good quality necessarily in a politiciann3 or a president. bill clinton was incredible at transactional politics. i call him the most

brilliant, authentic phony i've ever seen. [laughter] because he could be whatever he had to be and barack obama has a more difficult time with that. and if he were just in another setting dealing with you, you wouldn't say that he's aloof or cool or anything like that. >> so for you the obama who is visible in the first debate -- by way, reminded many of us in texas running for reelection in '94, perhaps not entirely in retrospecttthat fight to be governor again, you snow? but the obama who we saw in that debate did not surprise you based on your knowledge of him? >> no. >> because he seemed to be anything other than interested in being president i thought he was tendency that he has. i thought that he was -- his natural instinct is to not be confrontational, which goes through his whole personality as learn how long to negotiate different cultures. even when he was a community organizer in chicago, it drove the other organizers

crazy that barack obama wouldn't confront people in the way that they did. -úhe found other ways around to get what he wanted, but it wasn't confrontation. and thirdly, because that ambivalence showed up. and fourth, for that debate, his campaign was in a defensive mode. we're going to win this, just don't blow it. so for all of those reasons that fed into the difficullies of that debate, which for the most part were stylistic as opposed to substantive problems. >> but the problems from this vantage point. >> really damaging. >> the defense viewpoint rarely works. >> it doesn't in sports. >> i wonder about the process of writing this book as much as the substance of it. you've written again amazing biographies, i'm a huge nan of the clementi book, the lombardi is fantastic, but those were written at a time when the resources available

to you through technology to gather material and process material were maybe not the same as they are now. the life of the a biographer, the process has been impaated byy ccess to records, technology and all that. i would imagine significantly. >> well, there's so much i could talk about there. i was afraid and i'm thinking about future biigraphers what will be on the record -- is it all going to be email and tweets and so on. >> right. >> luckily barack obama did write letters and he did keep a journal and he was a writer. so that helped in terms of that. and he was -- everybody had to deal with for the most part was alive and his parents were and his grandparents. and the hundreds of interviews that go into this book. i went to 16 libraries and archives around the world for this book. and everything i do is sort of three things. i believe in going there, wherever there is -- >> yep. >> so for the lombardi book

and turning to my wife and uttering the loving words how would you like to move to green bay for the winter? [laughter] >> you've got to be a die hard to want to do thht. >> a lot easier to say do you want to go to san juan, puerto rico to do clementi or to ome for the rome book. and this book we went all over the world and that was really a great experience. >> and i guess it must be easier in some ways in that you have more ready access to the archives of libraries and then harder the stuff that we'rr talking about. when the ryan presidency or the julian castro presidency of years to come, a lot of that material will not be in the form of letters and journals one imagines, but it will be more in the form of facebook postings and tweets. you're exactly right about that. >> and that's a concern. very much so. what the records wiil be. most of my biographies deal with the recent past where have all of the -- all of the possibilities for3 archival materials.

so i'm not too concerned about from my books, but i think for future historians it will be a problem. >> what about a living person versus a non-living& person? harder or easier? >> oh, it's much harder. and what i try to do -- >> harder to do a living person? >> living person. and what i try to do, and i don't meen this in a ghoulish way, is i have to sort of pretenn they're not there, that they're gone because if you as a writer react to the -- what's popular at the moment, you know, it's really, really dangerous. >> yep. >> so i have to try to as much as i can wipe away what's going on at the moment because then you''e writing -- what i want -- i want my books to last so i'm trying to find the aspects of a personality that are deeply rooted in that person and that can explain what he does whatever he's doing in the future. but if you just respond to whether somebody is up or down at the moment and try to write a book to that, it

becomes worthless in a year. >> by the time the book comes out you're fighting the last war. how much do you pay attention to people writing on the same subjjct? this is someone, president obama has been covered -- off the top of my head, jonathan alter wrote a book about a first year of the obama president. another book about the president. those are the -- in essence the nonpartisan or mostly nonpartisan books. on either side there are the books that are loving or passionate supporters of and haters, ed klein. booos about this president. do you just ignore that? >> well, the daily beast had a story, some guy said that there are 89 obama hate books out there. >> just hate books. >> just hate books. 89 of them. and those i ignore. >> there was a point that there were three on the best seller list. >> it's really depressing. even today half the best seller list -- >> what do you do about people swimming in the same pool as you on this? >> what i do is i pick and choose who i respect. and --

>> did you read the recommendnick book? >> yes, absolutely. >> while you were writing this boom. >> before i started. rem nick, ally jacobs wrote a book on obama's father. there was a -- >> on obama's mother. >> on obama's mother, which is very good. and those i've read. >> yeah. >> but then once i started my book i put them aside. i wanted ting into a book with no presupposition. so i read them and saw where they ould -- you know, looked for places they could take me in terms of research. but no other purpose. and actually, two of those books came out while i was doing my -- you know, they weren't really of any use in that sense either. i was already -- >> you're so far down the path at that point. did you get any feedback from the big guy on this book? >> that's clinton. clinton is the big guy. >> i'm ssrry. i thought he was the big dog. i thought -- i've got to get this exactly right. >> i wouldn't want direct feedback, but i know -- i

mean, he knows that it's the real deal and he's told people to read it. >> so you're a washington post reporter for so many years. how does the association with the post when you're writing a book like this help or hurt or is it neutral? >> well, i have a racket going. i mean, i'm called an associate editor at the post which means i don't have to associate with editors. [laughter] >> that's what it means. i always wondered. okay. great. good deal. >> i love the paper. i've been there for 35 years. and they let me do my thing. it's sort of like a professor emeritus. so i do some editing of major projects. i write when i -- when i'm available. and i do books the rest of the time. >> is that still a calling card? i guess i'm thinking back to the stories about woodward and bernstein during watergate saying this is carl bernstein in the washington post or woodward and having that be a way to are pry a door open. >> when they were in

watergate i don't know whether it was. it was their hard work, it wasn't the newspaper. and after that just what wood word does. >> but it allowed them to call up someone who they didn't know and didn't they gnome and it gavv them great credibility, i would imagine. >> i would imagine so, evan. i've always thought that the -- you know, i benefit from the post and the post benefits from me. >> i'm sure the latter. >> so i mean, i think it's an even trade. i love being assoccated with the washington post. but not because of that influence, but because of the ethical standards that it represents. >> the brand is still a it represents trying to find the truth wherever it is. >> is that the case with the news business generally? >> no. >> i want to ask you about the state of the business. don't bum me out, now. [laughter] we've got about three minutes left. being in the newspapee business these days is a choice or an obligation or a good thing, bad hing and how are we doing? >> it's difficult. i mean, it's a struggle.

but -- and i think some úewspapers will survive and some won't. whether 10 years from now there will actually be printed, or 20 years from now there will be printed daily newspapers or it will all be somewhere in the ether, i'm not sure. >> the people who suggest that we may actually see an era of newspapers in cities just completely disappearing, you don't think that's owe high per bowly. >> do 20-year-olds read newspapers or read them online? i don't know. mostly not. >> yep. >> but on the other hand, when you go to a journalism school like u.t. where i spoke in may, there are plenty of kids who love old-fashioned journalism, which is really encouraging.3 >> well, it's romantic. the question is is it practical? >> well, of course. thht's the question. but -- nd nobody even has figured out practical ways to make money off, you know, web versions of newspapers really. not yet. >> but here's what my

essential sensibility is that the platform is less important than two other things. one is that human beings have a need for story. that story helps sort of explain and define and it's just -- it's the essence of what we are. and so as long as there's a need for story and there are people who go out and try to aatually find the truth and do the real reporting, whatever platform those two things come in is not as important as those two things existing. and in some ways the question now is can we have enough people wanting to go out and actually do the real reporting as opposed to tweet and just blog things that they haven't reported. through these new platforms. that's the real question. >> the need for story is free, but getting people who are willing to go out to do all that costs. and the problem is really that the resources that are necessary to enable the second to meet the demand of the first are not as available as they were even

five years ago. >> i agree. i have no answer. >> you don't have an answer? >> i'm sorry, i don't. >> i thought you would have an answer. >> i just do what i can do. that's all any journalist should do, i mean really. i mean, the best way i can make that happen is by just stories i can. >> and have them be their own calling card. >> right. >> this book is so great, but you know i think all your books are so great. among people in our business that you continue to knock the cover off the believer time. thank you very much for being here. good to see ou. connratulations. david maraniss, thank you so much. [applause] >> we'd love to have you join us in the studio. visit our website at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q and a's with our audience and guests and an archive of past episodes. >> why should i have to disprove something that on its face makes no sense? when i look at it as with anything else i try to look at the most serious, factual

ways to determine something. there's no rational reason to doubt that he was born there on that date. >> funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by... the matson mchail foundation in support of public television. also by mfi foundation, improving the quality of and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community, experienced, respected and tested. also by hillco partners, texas government affairs3 consultancy, and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health. and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and viewers like you. thank you.